Shawkat Toorawa

Toorawa was born in London, England to Mauritian parents of Indian origin. Both parents were Muslim, one Shia and one Sunni, and were married in 1962. The family moved three years later, in 1965, to Paris, France where his father was transferred.

He first became aware of being Muslim in 1966 through his Senegalese tutor, Abdullah Diop, who came to their apartment daily to teach him the Arabic Script and stories about the prophets. A year later, at the age of five he began attending the English School of Paris. It was here that he learnt about Moses, Jesus and Muhammad and began constructing his understanding of interfaith differences. His parents told him the “different people believed different things” and that as Muslims they “did not believe that Jesus had been killed or that he had died on the cross, but that Christians did, and that was OK.”[1] He performed the Hajj with his family before they moved to Osaka, Japan and then Hong Kong in 1972. A year later the family moved to Singapore where he attended an international school. Though the population of Singapore is 15% Muslim, in the school for expatriates he was one of a small number of Muslims.[2] He credits this system with cultivating his love of all faiths and their traditions. He read The Lord’s Prayer at assembly and still sings Christmas carols.

In 1981 he left Singapore to pursue a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated magna cum laude in 1985.[3] He continued to pursue his education at the University of Pennsylvania for the next four years and graduated with a Master of Arts in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Islamic Studies) in 1989. He returned to the university in 1998 to pursue a Ph.D. in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Islamic Near East) with distinction. He taught at Duke University from 1989 to 1991, and at the University of Mauritius from 1996 to 2000. He taught at Cornell University from 2000 to 2016.

He has written about Classic and Medieval Arabic Literature, Modern Arabic poetry, the Quran, Islam and the Indian Ocean. His research focuses mainly on the Middle East and South Asia.

He is a former Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow. He is Co-Executive Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, an initiative to translate classical and premodern Arabic Literature, for which he is preparing a critical edition of the Shifa' al-‘alil by the eighteenth-century belletrist Azad Bilgrami. He is also a Director of the School of Abbasid Studies.

The Dr.T Project was an idea that first occurred to Toorawa in 2010 while trying to teach students in his classes by connecting subject material to pop culture. When he found that most students didn’t understand the references he teased his class by saying he should teach a class called “Everything Professor Toorawa Thinks You Should Know but You Don’t.”

Students began emailing him asking if such a class did exist and on August 24, 2010 Carol Grumbach, director of the Carol Tatkon Center at Cornell University offered to run such a program at the center. "Something like 50 or 60 people showed up," Toorawa said. "And we thought, 'This might work.'” Since then the Dr.T Project has been in session once a week during academic semesters (tea and shortbread are served as an additional lure).[4][5] It moved to Willard Straight Hall in 2013 where with the assistance of the Browsing Library Director, Brandon Pierotti, the program garnered much continued success.